Reconstructing the historical phonology of Old English

This article offers a new reconstruction of the phonological history of pre-Old English, building on a potential parallelism between English, Frisian and North Germanic. Pivotal to the reconstruction is the development of PGmc *a, which is the target of eight different sound laws in the traditional theory. A combination of a conditional early fronting and rounding, followed by a gradual i-mutation impact, both with parallels in Frisian, and a relatively late seventh-century application of breaking before ‑rC can account for most of the attested spellings of instances with PGmc *a in the language of the early Épinal and Erfurt glossaries. This approach is much simpler than the traditional theory and allows parallelisms to be (re)established between the earliest stages of Old English, Old Frisian and Old Norse.